


the sun in winter

by abeaufortinnewyork



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Game of Thrones Fusion, Dragons, F/M, Rating for later chapters, if you will, or a new understanding of the name 'skywalker', yes dragons
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-04-28 19:11:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14455902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abeaufortinnewyork/pseuds/abeaufortinnewyork
Summary: It has been twenty years since the last dragon, Anakin Targaryen, was defeated by the Rebellion led by Luke Sand, Lady Leia Organa, and the Essosi pirate Han Solo. Twenty years since the last knight of the Order of the Dragon, Ser Obi-Wan Kenobi, was killed at the Battle of the Death Star. Gone is the old age of magic and legend - or so it would seem.At Alderaan, Lord Ben Organa, the son of Rebellion heroes Lady Leia and Han Solo, is widely rumored to be responsible for his father’s murder after the Lord Consort of Alderaan died under mysterious circumstances. Disgraced, he is compelled to renounce his claims on Alderaan, travel north, and take the black as a brother of the Night’s Watch.But more challenges await the troubled young lord at Castle Black. The stirrings beyond the Wall first feared in the time of King Anakin the Red are now growing more threatening, and the Night’s Watch is dispatched on daily ranges into the territory of the Free Folk. There Ben encounters a fiery wildling leader named Rey, in whom he recognizes a strange kinship, and who will change his life - and the destiny of the Seven Kingdoms - forever.-A Reylo Game of Thrones AU.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hello there! a quick word about this AU before we begin: this is not a crossover. there are no characters from game of thrones to be found in this story. however, since westeros is such a precisely drawn universe, in which families and geography are closely intertwined, there will be some familiar names. I've chosen to substitute star wars families where obvious or otherwise necessary for the story. I did this three times. see below for the those houses, the territories they control, and the names of their seats. 
> 
> house organa -> the vale (alderaan)  
> house mothma -> the riverlands (chandrila)  
> house naberrie -> the reach (varykino)
> 
> apart from those, you'll see traditional game of thrones families (stark, baratheon, etc.) controlling the other territories. that's all for now - I don't want to give too much away!
> 
> also, the westeros I'm imagining here is drawn primarily from the show. my apologies in advance if I get something wrong from the books.

“Did you do it?”

Ben Organa studies his mother’s face, his eyes raking slowly, meticulously, and for the last time over her wearied eyes and worry-creased forehead. The songs told of a fair maid of Alderaan, a beauty so divine she rallied nearly all of Westeros to the Rebellion. But now her once-famous youth and beauty are dimmed, lost to the wind with the memory of fame.  

 _Did you do it?_ she asks him. _Did you kill your father, my husband, the Lord of Alderaan and one of the great heroes of his age?_

Ben is silent. Something distant aches in his heart.

“Off with you, then,” she mumbles, dropping her hands from where they had framed his jaw. “Thank you again for your service, Ser Lando. House Organa is grateful to you.”

Ser Lando Calrissian, seated proudly astride a speckled chestnut charger, inclines his head in acknowledgment. “And I to you, my lady. I’ll take good care of the boy.”

Ben bites back a snarl at such a belittling address. He is nearly twenty-four now, a man grown, and until only lately the heir apparent of Alderaan. Years have passed — long, aching years — since he last called himself a boy. He was a boy when he traipsed happily across the courtyards of his mother’s castle, when he sparred with the Alderaan Master-at-Arms on the speckled rock of the Vale. 

“Come on, then,” says Ser Lando now, drawing in his reins. His mount releases an anxious whinny. “We’ve got a long ride north.”

The ride is long indeed, and largely silent. As their horses amble lazily out of sight of Alderaan, Ben is struck with a sudden, almost violent awareness of just how peculiar the silence is. Gods, it almost feels wrong. When he was young, and the joy of his mother’s court, he was visited often by Ser Lando, who made frequent incursions into Westeros from his wealthy trading post along the Narrow Sea — some for business, some for pleasure.

 _When you’re older,_ Lando had been fond of saying, _I’ll get you on a ship. Sailing on the open sea — it’s the closest thing we have to flying. Just ask your father._

Ben winces at the memory. 

Soon the grayish, clouded mountains of the Vale give way to the rugged water country of the Riverlands, and Ben’s tired shoulders shrug in time with the clumsy gait of his mount. They must be close to the Northern border when, at the darkening, purplish hour just before twilight, they pause to water their horses. “I’ve written Lord Frey,” Lando says, squinting at the fog-clouded horizon. “The Twins are a short ride north.”

“Lord Frey?”

“Yes,” says Lando. “He’s agreed to let us overnight there.”

Ben crosses to his horse, packs his canteen back into the saddlebag. “I’d rather not.”  
“And why is that?”

His cheeks heat, and his hands still on the saddlebag. “You know.”

“You were betrothed to a Frey girl, weren’t you?”

 _Until you killed your father, and brought the scorn of Westeros upon your head._ Ben has lived long enough to seek for unspoken words in darkened eyes and worry-creased brows. “Lord Frey is a spiteful old man,” he mutters, mounting his horse in one swift movement. “I’m not sure I trust his hospitality.”

Lando eyes him warily. “Very well. What would you have us do, then? Sleep in the woods?”

“I’m sure there’s an inn somewhere in these parts.”

There is. It’s a shoddy-looking building, built of crumbling, moss-eaten stone and rotting wood. But there’s light spilling from the windows, and as the darkness gathers almost menacingly around them, Ben and Ser Lando are left little choice but to tie up their horses and inquire after rooms inside. 

The tavern, at least, is bustling. Ben drinks in the scene: the sloshing ale; the merry, red-cheeked patrons stumbling to their seats; the barmaids traipsing through the drunken crowds. His father had taken to him to such a place, some brisk autumn night years ago, when he was seventeen and on the verge of manhood. _One day soon you’ll take a wife,_ he’d said. _You’ll want to please her on the wedding night. Best that you have some experience beforehand._

Now Ben’s eyes shift down, ashamed, when one of the whores across the room meets his gaze.

Lando pushes through to the innkeeper’s counter, slamming the heel of his palm down against the wood. “A room, man!”

No man appears to serve them, only a small boy, clad in rags with a terrific scar cutting across his nose. “By the Seven!” he gasps. “You’re Lando Calrissian! The Rebellion hero!”

At this Lando cannot help but smile. Ben bites his lip and looks down again, knotting his fingers together. “And how could a youngster like you know of the Rebellion?” asks Lando.

The boy beams. “Last week m’father sent me into a patron’s room to clean, and I swear I did find upon his desk a book such as I ‘ad never seen, and I looked i’side, and there was an image o’ you, ser! In your fine blue cloak, such as you’re wearin’ now. But I couldn’t read it — I couldn’a tell it was you — but the guest ‘appened to come back and find me there, lookin’ through his things. But ‘e wasn’t mad! He told me the stories ‘imself. Said he knew you.”

“Is that so?” says Lando, leaning against the counter now. “Do you remember his name?”

Ben remembers a magnificent, leather-bound book his father had brought from Chandrila on the twenty-year anniversary of the Peace. In those days it was called a victory album, dedicated to Queen Mon and replete with splendid, gold-lined images of the heroes of the Rebellion. 

 _There’s your mother,_ his father had said, pointing to the portrait of a white-clad lady, her hair drawn up in twin buns to frame her delicate face. _A beauty then, and a beauty now. And see the castle there behind her? That was the old Alderaan. It stood for thousands of years before the armies of King Anakin the Red burnt it to the ground._

Before the boy can answer the beaming knight across from him, the innkeeper bursts around the corner, wiping the sweat from his brow with a dirtied rag.

“Father!” the boy cries. “Look! It’s Lando Calrissian ‘imself, come to stay at _our_ inn!”

The innkeeper is a broad-bodied man, dressed in a battered leather vest and a loose-sleeved undershirt, and donning a felt cap atop his grizzled hair. There’s a well-tried country gruffness to him, and Ben is suddenly and acutely conscious of his straightened back, fine clothes, proudly tilted chin. He relaxes his tall, ungainly form awkwardly against the counter.

“Mind you call him _Ser_ Lando Calrissian, boy,” the innkeeper corrects sharply. “Gods know it’s an honor to have you, Ser Lando.” Now his eyes fall to Ben, who is nervously tapping his thumb on the wooden bartop. “And who’s this?”

“This is B—”

“Kylo Ren,” Ben answers sharply.

Lando shoots him a questioning glance, but Ben presses his lips into a tight, unforgiving line. 

“Kylo Ren,” the innkeeper repeats, tilting his head. “Very well, then. Two rooms, one night?”

“One night, yes.”

The innkeeper nods, sends the boy upstairs with a lazy flick of his wrist. “Traveling, eh? Where to?”

Lando’s answer is curt, further conversation. “North.”

“Hope you’ve packed well,” the innkeeper says gruffly. “They say a long winter is coming.”

“By the Gods, man,” laughs Lando. “You sound like a Stark.”

The innkeeper looks up with a wry, knowing smile. “The Starks are always right eventually.”

At the words — at the prospect of winter — Ben’s skin cools eerily. He shifts, and the cold goes deeper, straight to his bones. A shiver runs up his spine, tightens the tendons in his neck, and he draws a hand there, thumb and index finger massaging the suddenly taut flesh.

“Are you all right?” Lando asks, brow furrowed. The innkeeper, too, looks up from his records, tilting his chin and studying Ben with a wary eye. 

“Fine,” he chokes out. “Something… I felt something….” But he trails off as his neck grows blood-warm again, and his flesh hisses away its chill. “Nothing.”

Lando’s brow furrows still more sharply, but he knows better than to prod further. “Our horses are tied out front,” he says, turning slowly to face the innkeeper across the counter.

“The boy’ll get them,” says the innkeeper gruffly. "Now, would you care for dinner? I’ve got a fine cook. Makes a meet pie fit for the gods.”

Ben, desperate for sleep, leans forward to answer, but Lando cuts in before he can. “We’d be happy for a meal,” he says with a nod. “Long day of traveling has me hungry — and Kylo too, I imagine.” 

Ben scowls.

They take their dinner in silence. Ben keeps his eyes trained resolutely on his meal, finds he cannot look at the merrymaking around him without his treacherous heart tugging like a child’s. 

“Kylo Ren?” Lando says at last, wiping his mouth as a barmaid takes away their empty plates.

“Yes,” Ben answers, a bit curtly. 

“Where does that come from?”

Ben frowns. “An old song,” he mutters. It’s a beautiful song, a song of power and fury, but somehow he thinks its beauty would elude Lando. As it had eluded his father. _Enough of that old poetry, kid. Life isn’t always as pretty as it is in those songs. Now go on down to the yard; Ser Ricard is waiting._

“And what did this Kylo Ren do?”

“He was a knight,” Ben answers. “The Master of the Knights of Ren.”

Lando leans back in his chair. “Must’ve been a long time ago.”

“Yes,” Ben says with a rare smile, remembering the opening lines of the poem, close to singing them aloud. “In a kingdom far, far away.”

\--

That night, for want of sleep, Ben wanders downstairs and out into the purplish night. In the air is the warning chill of almost-winter, and he hugs his chest against the cold. 

He lifts his face to the northerly wind and thinks of the Wall, the fate that awaits him. In old tomes of history he’d read much of the Night’s Watch, the black-clad warriors who had guarded the realm of men for thousands of years. It will suit him well, he thinks, to serve among them. There, at the Wall, does a man win his honor by deeds and acts, not his mother’s name or new-built palace.

His eyes drop.

On his ring finger glints the ring Lady Leia had given him on his tenth nameday — the tenth anniversary of the Peace. It sparkles with rare stones, arranged in the symbol of the Rebellion. 

He slides the ring off his finger, studies it closely as it catches the pale light of the moon. With a sigh and a sudden tight-knitted frown, he tosses the ring to the ground and toes it into the dirt, clenching his fist at the exertion. “Let the past die,” he mutters to himself, as if chanting a mantra. “Kill it, if you have to.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this will be a ben-centric work, especially for the first few chapters, but let me know if you want a rey POV chapter before they meet! 
> 
> and come say hi on tumblr - @beautyandtheren :)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi everyone!!!! so sorry for the delay in updating! I just finished school so hopefully updates can come a bit more quickly now. unless the internship I'm starting on monday proves more taxing than anticipated...
> 
> anyway, enough of my personal ramblings!! enjoy chapter 2, and please do let me know what you think! I love hearing your thoughts! (seriously, each comment is like a christmas present <3)

“Rey!”

Rey stills, glances over her shoulder. Every well-tried muscle in her body is tense, waiting, and her knuckles go white around the wrapped handle of her weapon. But when it’s Poe who scrambles up the rocky promontory, she relaxes her grip on her staff and sets it to rest at her side. “Who is that?” he asks, a little breathlessly, indicating the ugly jag of rock whose edges are marked with sundry white scratches, glances from her staff. 

“What do you mean?”

“You’re imagining someone when you train,” he says, squinting. “Who is it?”

“You know,” she mutters, slinging her staff over her shoulder and making to follow him down the cliffside path to the village. “The man who killed my parents.”

“Ah,” Poe sighs. “And you’re sure it’s a man?”

Rey swallows, nearly answers him: _Of course I am._ _I see his face every night in my dreams_. But instead she heaves a great sigh, watching idly as the vapored cloud of her breath fades into the pinkish sunset. “I’m sure,” she murmurs, more to the horizon than to Poe. “As sure as I am that one day, soon, I’ll kill him.”

Behind her, Poe is silent, the crunch of his boots in the snow the only signal of his following her. Like most of the Free Folk who’ve raised her, he’s never much cared for her pining for her parents. But Poe has a family, a name, something to stretch before his birth and after his death. Rey has nothing. Is nothing. 

“Did Finn send you?” she asks now, her tone sharp, high-pitched.

“Yeah,” Poe answers. “He wanted to talk to you. The Fist is crawling with Crows.”

Rey tilts her head in questioning as she traipses further down the path, into the wide-cast shadow of the mountain. “More?”

“They’ve been sending out more rangers than usual from Castle Black. He thinks they know about the Walkers.”

Rey’s flesh chills to the bone at the mention of the Walkers. A shiver crawls up her spine, works the muscle and tendons in her neck into a paralyzing tension. The sensation is eerily familiar, but it’s gone as quickly as it had come. “And?” she chokes out, a little lowly. 

“I’m worried he wants some kind of peace,” Poe mutters. By now they’ve emerged into the valley, and he sidles up beside her, eyes flaring. “He won’t listen to me, but you _have_ to talk him out of it. We can’t… make peace with them. Not after what they did to Paige.”

With a sharp pang, Rey remembers Poe stumbling through the furs draped over the entrance to Finn’s hut, Paige’s limp and bloodied body in his arms. The memory burns uncannily bright: the rude red gash in her neck, the flesh peeling away from the exposed blood and bone, the savage sear of fury in Poe’s voice: _Crows. It was the Crows._

But Rey remembers, too, the White Walker. Five moons ago, she’d woken in a cold sweat from her nightly dream of the black-haired, black-clad murderer to find the air in her tent eerily still, and the cold in her skin cutting eerily deep. By the time the Walker had glided ghostlike into her sight, his hair glowing white in the silvery moonlight and his skin stretched like sparkling diamond over his skeletal frame, Rey had seized her staff and risen from her bed to parry the downward arc of his ice-wrought spear. Something unnatural and otherworldly had seized her then — and filled her mind’s eye with fire.

 _Fire._ All in a blur she’d reached for the torch burning low at her bedside, and set fire to the furs slung across her bed and the wood-stacked walls. When she’d scampered out of the burning tent, the flames had licked her face and caught on her jacket, and, flinging herself desperately toward the snowbank, she’d braced herself for pain untold. But none had come. And the last thing she’d seen had been the blue burn of the Walker’s eyes through the flame, the grave-cold thunder of his dying wail.

They called her Rey Wintersbane after that. 

“I don’t know, Poe,” she murmurs now as they reach the outskirts of the settlement. “The Walkers… we’ll need all the help we can get to defeat them.”

“Well, I don’t want their help,” he spits. “I’d sooner die than fight alongside a Crow.”

Rey scowls. “You might well get your wish.”

They trudge in silence through the snowdrifts that ring the village. The settlement is bustling in the purplish winter twilight; as they draw closer to its heart, they meet with more and more familiar faces. Rey receives their greetings with humble smiles and lowered eyes. Already they think of her as some sort of hero, which sets her ill at ease.

By the time they reach the center of the village, where Finn's hut sits guarded by two fur-clad Hornfoot, Rey is ready to disappear inside.

“Rey!” calls Finn, ducking out of the hut and cracking a grin. “I’m glad Poe found you. Good training, then?”

“Good enough,” she answers, casting a last surly glance in Poe’s direction before heading toward Finn. He claps her shortly on the back, and she almost winces at his touch.

“What is it?” she asks bluntly, bustling into the hut and seating herself without ceremony before the spitting fire.

“Hey,” he says, his voice low, eyes flitting about and disregarding her question. “You okay?”

“Fine,” she mutters, closing her eyes with a sigh when Finn’s hand comes to rest on her knee. “I’m sorry. It’s just—”

“The dreams.”

Finn is the only of the Free Folk to whom she’s recounted the dreams in detail. He is the only one who knows that the murderer she sees by night is black of hair, tall and broad-shouldered, some perverse incarnation of a hero’s figure. Finn is the only one who knows he comes on a mount white as snow, his wide shoulders draped with the furred cloak of the Night’s Watch, his black-gloved hand moving toward her throat. 

“They’re coming more frequently,” she confesses warily. “The dreams. It’s like… like he’s getting closer.”

A beat of silence; Finn widens his eyes. “He’s alive?”

When she dreams of the murderer’s face — long, sad, and though she admits it to herself only in the shadowed solitude of her bed, handsome in a dark, unusual way — she _feels_ him in every fiber of her being. She knows he’s alive as surely as she knows that the sun will rise next morning over the Shivering Sea. 

But it’s a strange thing, her knowing, and she holds her tongue under Finn’s worried gaze.

“Forget it. They’ll pass.” Rey heaves a sigh, injects a note of finality into it. Forces a smile to put the issue definitively to rest. “But you wanted to see me.”

Finn releases her knee, his great wide brow furrowed in concern. “The hunting party led by Dex and the others,” he begins lowly. “They haven’t returned for days.”

“That’s not unusual,” Rey counters, a bit uneasily, warming her hands by the fire. “Dex likes to take his time. And besides, game might be scarce.”

“There’s no competition,” Finn says. “All the clans are gathered here. Together.”

This, though Finn’s tone is ominous, is an almost impossible blessing. The Free Folk are notoriously diverse, a smattering of clans and customs and tongues whose only hope at union comes now, at the dawn of a new war with the dead. Finn, himself a man of no name and no tribe, and three years out from deserting his post at Castle Black, is their brave but unlikely leader. Maybe it was his twenty years among the Andals that taught him the tact and diplomacy required to gather such different peoples under one leader. 

Or maybe it was the threat of death and its attending horrors that drove them under his command. 

“Rey,” Finn says, dropping his voice. “We’ve sent out search parties. They haven’t found the bodies.”

“There are animals—”

“Listen,” he hisses sharply. “You’re the only one of us who’s fought a White Walker and won.”  
“I got lucky,” she hisses back. “I… somehow I managed not to get burned.” As if in memory, her hand ghosts over the cheek, the shoulder, the chest and arm that ought to have been scarred that night. “But that’s the only way to defeat them. Fire.”

Finn’s lip twitches. “And Valyrian steel, and dragonglass.”

Rey narrows her eyes. “What?”

“Valyrian steel,” he sighs. “Don’t play the fool. You know what it is.” This is true; Finn knows the lands and peoples south of the Wall far better than she ever will, but she knows enough to recall the power and legacy of Valyrian steel. “The great houses of Westeros all have swords and daggers and other weapons made from it. But such weapons can’t be forged any longer — only passed down from generation to generation. We certainly won’t get any of them here.

“Dragonglass, on the other hand,” Finn continues, “exists in great stores on Dragonstone.”

“Dragonstone?” 

Finn’s eyes drop to the snow-streaked mud on the floor. “This,” he says, grabbing a short twig and beginning a crude sketch, “is Westeros. Here is the Wall. Castle Black. The North. Winterfell.” A few wobbling lines, a star to mark each of the great castles south of the Wall. He drags the twig down the roughly drawn map of Westeros. “And here is Dragonstone, the old seat of House Targaryen.”

“House Targaryen,” Rey breathes quietly. 

“Extinct after the death of King Anakin the Red,” Finn sighs, rocking back into his seat and smudging the map with the toe of his boot. “No help to us, or to anyone.”  
“They were the blood of the dragon,” Rey whispers.

Finn glances up, eyebrows raised. “You’ve heard the songs?”

“Once, on a raid south,” she answers. “We posed as beggars, and Lord Stark took us in for the night and fed us in his hall. He had a bard sing to us of the old legends of Westeros.” 

Finn’s eyes take on a strange glint. “And what did you think?”

In truth, though it would pain her now to admit it, she’d thought them beautiful. The bard had shut his eyes and sung with a rich, velvet voice of knights and heroes, of dragons and the men who tamed them, and Rey had felt her young heart swell at the poignant majesty of legend, whose eternity seemed to laugh in the face of her nothingness. “Silly things, their songs,” she mutters now. “Silly things for a silly people.” Something hardens in her chest, and she sets her jaw, raising her eyes to Finn’s. “No matter how dire the Walkers’ threat becomes, we cannot ally with men who kneel for the sake of arbitrary titles and soothe themselves with pretty songs.”

“No,” he answers, eyes locked with hers. “No, you’re right. We’ll fight our way south of the wall. But my kneeling days are over.” As if to prove his point, he stands, straightening his back. “I made my decision too long ago to go back now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok so clearly i couldn't resist writing a rey chapter.... will still probably be ben-centric, but we shall see how the story goes. but again, tell me your thoughts!!


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